Brooklyn Boro

April 28: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

April 28, 2022 Brooklyn Eagle History
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ON THIS DAY IN 1933, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “WASHINGTON (AP) — An attack by Senator [William] Borah upon the Government efforts to have citizens turn in their gold, in which the Idaho Senator said if he had $5,000 in gold he would ‘defy the Government to come and get it,’ pitched the Senate into a gold and banking debate today and delayed a vote on the bonus. As the Senate drove toward a ballot on the Administration’s currency expansion program, the Independent Republican asked: ‘Suppose the head of a family has preserved and placed where he believes it safe a certain amount of gold and has in a sense provided it as insurance against adversity; why should the Government insist that he bring it in and put it in a bank that may fail?’”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1937, the Eagle reported, “LONDON (U.P.) — Solicitors for Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson applied to the courts today for an award making her divorce from Ernest Simpson absolute. The divorce court is expected to grant the decree on Monday, leaving Mrs. Simpson free to marry the Duke of Windsor, who gave up the throne for her love. Officials tried to preserve great secrecy about the matter. A representative of the law firm of Theodore Goddard & Co., acting for Mrs. Simpson, visited Somerset House, in the Strand near the law courts where Sir Alfred Bucknell is due to act on the petition on Monday. After his visit, the book in which the applications are filed was closely guarded. It was inaccessible even to lawyers who usually are entitled to look at it on making application to do so. The climax of the most celebrated divorce case of the century came in routine fashion. The Goddard representative visited Somerset House, paid half a crown — 62 cents — and filed the necessary affidavit certifying that there is no legal bar to a final decree. Mrs. Simpson awaited the Duke at the Chateau de Cande at Monts, near Tours in western France. Some of the Duke’s baggage was there already and a specially redecorated suite was ready for him.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1942, the Eagle reported, “WASHINGTON — President Roosevelt in his address tonight will emphasize to the American people the need for ‘total effort’ in the waging of ‘total war,’ the White House said today. The President will speak to the nation from 10 to 10:30 p.m. on all radio networks. His address will go by short wave to all parts of the world. He will explain in detail the seven-point program to hold down living costs which he submitted yesterday to Congress. Secretary Stephen T. Early said the President will especially ‘invite attention to the fact that each of the seven points is dependent on the other if the whole program is made to work.’ There was general approval in Congress of points of the program calling for general price fixing, which will be announced tonight. But much opposition was developing to the farm price revision and new tax provision. The farm bloc prepared to fight what they termed the President’s effort to ‘depress’ agricultural prices, and claimed the support of the potent silver bloc.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1954, the Eagle reported, “Some 2,500 more Brooklyn boys and girls received inoculations today in the nationwide test of the new Salk vaccine against polio. An indication of how well the test was received in Brooklyn came today at the St. Mary Mother of Jesus Parochial School, 85th St. and 23rd Ave. A total of 92 requests for vaccine shots had been received, but when the inoculation teams showed up today there were 150 children waiting for the shots. The inoculations completed the first phase of the largest mass evaluation of a vaccine in medical history. The youngsters will get a second injection next week and a third and final booster shot a month later.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1929, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Second in importance to the business and residential developments contemplated for the downtown section of the boro, resulting from recent real estate deals and described on this page last Sunday, is the building activity and transformation underway in the locality of Brighton Beach, running into $12,000,000. Large apartment houses, accommodating from 50 to 125 families, have sprung up like mushrooms overnight. Three years ago the Mira Mir apartment fronting the boardwalk stood alone like a lighthouse on a deserted beach. Today this building is practically lost to sight amid solid blocks of multi-family structures housing at least 3,500 families who are paying anywhere from $75 to $150 a month rent for suites ranging from three to six rooms. Anyone who has not been down Brighton Beach way in the past five years would be startled at the change that has taken place were he to visit the section today. Those who recall the days of the old Brighton Beach hotel, music hall, midway and band concerts and remember the extensive stretches of vacant land back of the amusement area, reaching to Sheepshead Bay, will hardly recognize the former playground. Even the old ocean beats against a man-made shore protected from inrushing tides by breakwaters of huge rocks taken from subway excavations in Manhattan and the Bronx.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1934, the Eagle reported, “ALBANY — New York City’s new charter will be drawn by a committee predominantly Democratic as the result of the last-minute hocus-pocus that preceded passage of the Charter Commission bill in the Legislature this morning. The Assembly Democrats, standing with their coats on and their hats in their hands in the well of the chamber, gave Mayor LaGuardia his final bitter pill of the session at 2:30 a.m., when they passed the commission bill with Frank J. Prial, the big boss of the civil service employees, included in the personnel. Immediately thereafter the 157th session of the Legislature ended. It was the longest in 11 years and the bitterest in several decades. It remained for Governor Lehman to save the charter bill at the last minute. The Democratic Senate passed the commission bill unanimously after Prial’s name had been inserted after a warning by the Republicans that Tammany would have to take responsibility for what the GOP described as a breach of contract. Over in the Assembly, the Republicans, being in the majority, balked at accepting Prial, who had led the fight against the New York City economy bill on the behalf of the city employees. The news was conveyed to Governor Lehman and he quickly reached the mayor on the telephone and insisted that he accept Prial in order to keep the bill from being killed and charter revision from being delayed another year.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1946, the Eagle reported, “DENVER, APRIL 27 (U.P.) — The army air forces lifted wartime secrecy tonight from a war-born radar device capable of locating from the air any spot on the earth’s surface with all but perfect accuracy. AAF experts said the contrivance, called ‘Shoran’ — short for ‘short range radar’ — was the greatest geographic invention since the compass and opened vast areas of the world to mapping. The ‘Shoran’ technique of electronic charting was hailed as the ‘answer to extremely accurate direction of automatically controlled missiles and other weapons’ and also as the beginning of a new era of navigation. The complicated radar device, developed originally for ‘through-the-overcast’ bombing, is being turned by a special AAF board to the gigantic peacetime job of producing a new and accurate map of the face of the earth. The mapping possibilities have been assigned to the 311th reconnaissance wing of the AAF and two business concerns — Radio Corporation of American and Minneapolis-Honeywell regulator company — for further development in the geodetic field. Lt. Col. Carl I. Aslakson of the 311th reconnaissance wing said the device makes possible a geodetic control network of the entire world and for plotting the distance of every point within a few feet of all other points on the globe. ‘Shoran’ will poke its charting fingers through miles of water to map the depths of the oceans and seas, and the trackless spaces of the earth’s surface.”

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Jessica Alba
Carlo Allegri/AP
Penelope Cruz
Andrew Medichini/AP

NOTABLE PEOPLE BORN ON THIS DAY include former Secretary of State James Baker, who was born in 1930; former N.Y. Yankees closer Pedro Ramos, who was born in 1935; “Viva Las Vegas” star Ann-Margret, who was born in 1941; comedian and talk show host Jay Leno, who was born in 1950; former Allman Brothers Band keyboardist Chuck Leavell, who was born in 1952; “Battlestar Galactica” star Mary McDonnell, who was born in 1952; Sonic Youth founder Kim Gordon, who was born in 1953; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who was born in 1960; Baseball Hall of Famer Barry Larkin, who was born in 1964; “Lost” star Jorge Garcia, who was born in 1973; Oscar-winning actress Penelope Cruz, who was born in 1974; “Sin City” star Jessica Alba, who was born in 1981; and NFL quarterback Blake Bortles, who was born in 1992.

Jorge Garcia
Jeff Christensen/AP

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FOUNDER’S DAY: James Monroe was born on this day in 1758. The fifth president of the U.S. (1817-1825) was born in Virginia and fought in the American Revolution. Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, is named after him, as is the Monroe Doctrine, which opposed further European colonialism in the Americas. He died in 1831 and was, along with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, one of three presidents to die on Independence Day. He was also the last president never to be photographed.

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SOUTHERN CHARM: Harper Lee was born on this day in 1926. The Alabama native wrote the 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winner “To Kill A Mockingbird,” one of the most beloved novels of all time. The film version, starring Gregory Peck as the heroic Atticus Finch, won three Academy Awards. Lee’s only other novel,  “Go Set a Watchman,” was released in 2015. She died in 2016.

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Special thanks to “Chase’s Calendar of Events” and Brooklyn Public Library.

 

Quotable

“The Washington Bullets are changing their name. They don’t want their team to be associated with crime. From now on, they’ll just be known as the Bullets.”
— Talk show host Jay Leno, who was born on this day in 1950

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